I just started reading Sesshu Foster’s really fucking strange book; I should qualify that the fact that I think it is really strange does not mean that I dislike it. As I am reading I envision Foster really enjoying being indulgent here with the idiosyncratic language in overdrive, of this idiosyncratic character who’s become, I think, quite unhinged. In the two realities he occupies in Foster’s “omniverse,” it’s hard to know where to ground myself. Even in the world of 1942 East L.A., which should be relatively familiar to us, the main character/hero Zenzon’s perceptions are not reliable to the reader. He’s either totally hallucinating, totally exhausted, or so far gone into his own headspace and so self-consumed (with self-pity, self-loathing, self-centeredness). So each section of this omniverse, as Zenzon experiences it, or depicts his experiences of it, is just bizarre to me.
I can also imagine Foster enjoying (sadistically) fucking off literary convention. Like fuck a narrative arc, fuck a character development. Which again is not necessarily a bad thing. Not sure yet what I think of the results.
Hopefully more on ATOMIK AZTEX soon.
Addendum: Something I’ve just thought of that might help ground me: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The sheer, unrelenting, almost unbearable hallucinatory bizarreness of it. Well, except that in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we get the progression of time, generally linear even with flashback. But in ATOMIK AZTEX, time’s not doing that either.